Our Guiding Compass?

The "big picture" regarding the Holocaust in Eastern Europe appears clear as proven by the steady stream of exposés that the Nazi German invasion merely provided the pretext for entire Eastern European peoples to join in exterminating their Jewish neighbors. In Latvia, local volunteers, not the Germans, were the principal executioners. Lithuania was under the boot of the joint "German-Lithuanian" occupation. Owing to its small Jewish population at the start of WWII, Estonians have been largely spared of accusations of murdering their neighbors—offset by endless accusations that they are, nevertheless, a cradle of post-Soviet neo-Nazism.1

None of these accounts asks the question does this make sense? Further investigation is not required in the face of the gospel truth revealed in Hitler's invasion of Eastern Europe: Eastern Europeans apparently had loathed the Jews—who had lived peacefully and flourished in their midst for centuries, keepers and nurturers of the oldest traditions of Judeo-Christian culture—with a deadly passion. That the Holocaust was so "successful" is attributed not to the pure evil of Hitler's industrialized genocide married to ruthless German efficiency, it is that the Shoah could only have so succeeded with widespread, if not universal, support and active participation of the local population. Ergo, the local population widely supported and actively participated. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Faced with competing versions of the Holocaust, what should be our guiding compass in our search for the truth?

To dig deeper. To accept no source purely at face value or in and of itself as the "truth."

Below, we examine specific events and allegations more closely.

  • Slonim, Belarus, 1942 — Officers of the 18th Latvian Police Battalion stood trial at KGB proceedings in 1961 and were eventually sentenced to deporation or death. According to KGB archives they killed all of Slonim's Jewish inhabitants. German records show most had been killed in two actions well before the Latvians arrived—and one officer could not have even been there when alleged. Something did happen after the Latvians arrived in Slonim, but more research remains to be done.

1Criticism of Estonian sentiment is not limited to the Russian press. In 2002, the U.S. ambassador to Estonia Joseph De Thomas published an op-ed piece in the Estonian daily Eesti Paevaleht indicating that Estonia's membership in NATO depended, in part, on Estonia eliminating resurgent anti-Semitism.
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